by Liz Harfull
KJ moved to Adelaide at the age of seventeen, to study marketing at university. Tim went to university, too, and in 2015 was back home for a while, working nightshift at a local winery and helping on the block. He is still making up his mind where his future might lie, but while she will always think of herself as a country girl, KJ can’t imagine returning to live in the Riverland. In between studies and part-time work at an Adelaide cafe, she still comes home though, whenever she can and lends a hand. Daljit says KJ knows the block almost as well as she does. KJ doesn’t agree, and she worries that her mother is still working so hard.
At peak times in the season, Daljit might be in the orchard for more than twelve hours a day, pushing herself physically to get everything done, mostly on her own. From June, when she starts pruning vines and picking Navel oranges, the tasks line up and she feels that if she has a few lazy days she will fall behind and the amount of work that needs to be done becomes overwhelming. The pruning doesn’t finish until August, and then she needs to deal with weeds. Harvesting Valencia oranges usually starts in November, and spring and early summer is a busy time for spraying, too.
Daljit will wake up as early as 5.30, have a cup of tea and watch a bit of television to ease herself into the day, and then spend eight hours sitting on a tractor. Depending on where she is working, she will pack lunch and take it with her. If she has time, she might help pick some oranges, working alongside the five or six backpackers employed to do this work. Mostly, she just keeps an eye on the large bins they fill, removing the full ones which are collected from the block, and replacing them with empty bins.
During the hot summer months, the grapevines need watering every second day and the irrigation system needs constant checking. Some years, if orchard work allows, Daljit takes an off-farm job in late summer, working in a local winery as a cellar hand to earn extra money. Depending on the weather and how quickly her own grape harvest is over, that essentially left April and May as the only opportunity for a holiday, until she planted persimmons and lemons to diversify her income. The persimmons are usually picked in March and April, and the lemons in May. ‘One job finish, the next one ready,’ she says.
May is also the time when preparations have to be made for renewing the orchard with fresh plantings, a constant process that helps keep her enterprise viable. It’s when trees or vines need to be pulled if they are no longer producing enough fruit or the variety has fallen out of favour and is not attracting enough money. Replacing them is an expensive exercise, and extremely labour intensive. Because most fruit blocks are small and neither trees or vines come into full production for at least a few years, it also means that part of the orchard is not earning anything. Daljit aims to replace no more than about a hectare a year, and she thinks carefully about what to plant. Her strategy is to study market trends for fruit that will offer better returns, and diversify the orchard to reduce risks and generate income in as many months as possible.
In between the never-ending cycle of responsibilities, there is the farmers’ market and the extra work Daljit has taken on cooking for community events. She usually attends the market fortnightly, as going every week is just too much on top of everything else. She goes into town and buys the ingredients she needs on a Thursday night, and then spends all day Friday cooking. After the market, she often comes home and sleeps for a couple of hours before heading out to the pump shed to turn the water on at four o’clock, as per the roster agreed with her neighbours.
Daljit admits it’s getting harder to work long days in the orchard as she gets older. She will come inside in the evening, eat dinner and then go straight to bed. As the weekend approaches, her body tells her it needs a rest, so she tries to spend one day pottering around doing housework and watching television. For Daljit, time inside is a treat. So is sitting down in the evening to a simple meal of pizza. Much like her experience with cornflakes, she didn’t like it at all when she first tried it. ‘Now I love pizza. I could eat it every day,’ she admits.
Looking back on her mother’s achievements, Monica realises that as children they never really thought hard enough about what Daljit was going through and what it took to keep the fruit block. ‘Your mum’s your mum. You never stop and think, but really we should,’ she admits. ‘She is brave, she is a hard worker, and she is kind. Maternally, she was pretty tough. We didn’t hug a lot in our family, I don’t know why, but we are better at that now. It was more an attitude of getting on with it. If something happens on the farm, she doesn’t panic, she just works through it, and she doesn’t cave under pressure.’
Too young to remember moving to the Riverland, Monica says she loved growing up on a farm, but it wasn’t easy for her and Tim as the only Indian children attending their primary school in Loxton. ‘We definitely had a hard time. You are different so you get picked on,’ she says. Reflecting on a quandary faced by many first-generation Australian children with Indian parents, she points out that there was a very strong sense of not completely belonging anywhere. When they visited India, they were not fully accepted because they grew up in Australia, but they were not the same as most of the other children they grew up with, either. ‘So we were sort of lost kids,’ she says.
For a start, Monica’s first language was Punjabi. That is what the family spoke at home, and she only learnt English when she went to kindergarten. ‘As kids you pick up languages pretty easily so it wasn’t that much of an issue, but now I am older I’m a pretty direct person and I think I got that from Mum. She had limited English so you had to be direct,’ Monica adds.
Then there was the lunchbox issue. A seemingly small thing now in a country which embraces food from around the world, it was not the case in the early 1990s at their school playground. While most of their peers sat down to sandwiches made with white bread, she and Tim often opened their lunchboxes to find Indian snacks. Much to Monica’s amusement, the same people who gave her a hard time over it are now buying Daljit’s food at the farmers’ market.
Although her father tended to be more strict with them than their mother, Monica says he was fun and that she had a great childhood. She was also spoilt by Paul’s parents, who lived with them for about six months every year, and spent the rest of the time in India. Her grandmother died of cancer when Monica was twelve. Her grandfather died a year or so after his son, compounding the sense of grief and emptiness in the house.
Monica was sixteen and about to start her final year of high school when Paul died. She coped by throwing herself into her studies. Her parents had always wanted their children to go to university so they had more options in life, and Paul’s untimely death did not change Daljit’s determination that they should have that opportunity. Inspired by her parents, Monica made up her mind that she would like to run her own business. She settled on becoming a pharmacist as the best way to achieve that ambition.
Despite doing well in her exams, Monica didn’t achieve enough points to be accepted into her preferred university course in Adelaide. ‘Pharmacy that year was really hard to get into, and I was pretty devastated,’ she says. A place was offered to her at Townsville in Queensland, but it was a long way from home. Encouraged by her mother, she accepted the offer anyway and was packing to go when a second-round offer came through from the University of South Australia. The relief was enormous. Monica wasn’t worried about leaving her mother because Tim and KJ would be there, and she had never helped much on the farm anyway, but she would be much closer to home if needed.
Like many of her Indian friends, Monica enjoyed the freedom of living away from home in a large city. Relatively speaking, she even let her hair down. ‘It was funny little things, like getting a piercing up on my ear,’ she confesses. In a move her friends thought was crazy, once she gained her qualifications Monica returned home. ‘I wanted to be there for my mum,’ she says. So she worked at a pharmacy in the Riverland for two years, before moving to Victoria where she lives now with her husband.
The story of how Monica and Hamon met
reflects changing attitudes in the Sikh community, within certain limits. ‘There are not as many arranged marriages in our generation but you still need the approval of your family, and it is not looked on well to have boyfriends,’ Monica explains. ‘My husband and I met through mutual friends and I was so scared someone would tell Mum I had a boyfriend that I told her straight away. My mum is more relaxed about these things compared with some other Punjabi families, but as soon as you say you’re seeing someone, it signals you are expecting marriage.’ Hamon told his parents, too. They had grown up in England so their attitudes were more relaxed, but he still wanted their blessing.
When it came to the wedding, there was never any question that it would take the form of a traditional Sikh celebration. Daljit even took Monica on a trip back to India to buy a custom-made wedding dress, and the main ceremony was held at the Sikh temple at Glossop, a few kilometres out of Berri. Monica says the whole occasion was much more relaxed than an arranged marriage, because the key players knew each other, but it was still full of deep symbolism, marking the traditional concept of a bride leaving one family to become part of another. Relatives flew in from around the world, joining local friends from outside the Indian community, such as Judy and David.
Happily married and living in suburban Melbourne, Monica realised her ambition to own a pharmacy when she was only twenty-six. Reaching her professional goal so early in life has left her thinking about what might come next. It’s not a question she takes lightly, and not just because she is a person who likes to set goals. In September 2014, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. ‘I went to the doctor for a regular check-up and when I was there he said, “Have you noticed a lump on your neck?” He had a biopsy done and it showed that it was benign,’ Monica explains.
When the lump grew to the size of a golf ball, her mother-in-law insisted that she get a second opinion. This time the doctor recommended surgery to remove it. Monica was extremely busy at work because her business partner was on maternity leave, but she reluctantly agreed. ‘I was not happy because I thought it was benign,’ she says.
When the pathology results came back after surgery, everything changed. The growth was malignant. Monica soon found herself back in surgery, having her entire thyroid gland removed. Then they discovered the cancer had escaped the thyroid so a few months later she had radiation treatment.
Monica says the whole experience has proved very confronting for her mother. ‘She doesn’t like talking about it. I can understand why, but I am very open about it. For me, it’s about raising awareness. If something isn’t right, you should get it checked. Being a pharmacist I know it can happen to anyone. I had a patient who was diagnosed with bone cancer and he died three months later. I’m just lucky we found it, and got rid of it. After radiation I had a scan and it was all gone. Now I’m on thyroid medication. I just have to take a tablet and have six-monthly check-ups.’
Strong like her mother, Monica tries not to worry about the cancer returning. ‘There is not much you can do. It’s out of your control. When the time comes round for my next body scan, I will deal with it then,’ she says.
For Monica, the illness has reinforced the importance of family and having someone close by who you can be with and talk to, not just in moments of crisis but to help deal with daily pressures. Looking back at her mother’s experience, she realises how hard it must have been for Daljit, with all her own family so far away. ‘Now I’m older she asks my opinion, but she didn’t have anyone for quite a while,’ Monica says.
‘I was sixteen when Dad died so I didn’t process everything that was going on, but I knew it was a big deal, everything that was happening. She was pretty brave to raise three kids and stay on the farm. A lot of farmers had to sell up with the drought, but she is still there and doing well. We don’t give her enough credit, and she doesn’t give herself enough credit, either. Even the neighbours think she is amazing, and I think she has probably amazed herself as well.’
KJ says her mum is quietly proud of what she has achieved, including receiving the Zonta Riverland Business Owner of the Year Award in 2010, when she was given an emotional standing ovation during the presentation dinner. ‘She knows how well she has done, but she does underplay it. She has run two fruit blocks, raised three kids, and kept going,’ she says. Reflecting on how she would describe her mother, KJ adds: ‘She is very hardworking. She is always working. Always. She wants to provide well for us so we have the best opportunities in life. Our futures always came first, and she has always provided what we needed.’
The Sikh temple at Glossop does not look at all remarkable on the outside. Low profile with a flat roof, it would draw very little attention if it wasn’t for the small tower at the front, topped with a white dome. A pair of large wooden doors open into a small foyer. Off to the right is a well-lit hall with a grey linoleum floor, and an open kitchen in the back corner. Ahead is a closed door, leading into the main worship area, known as the darbar sahib. Inside, the weekly Saturday service is in full swing, and the amplified sound of drums and a lone voice singing is clearly audible.
Daljit removes her flat black shoes and slips inside. Moving quietly, she finds an empty space among a group of women and children sitting just inside the door, and drops to the floor. In accordance with strict customs of the Sikh church, her hair is covered. Like most of the other women, she is wearing a traditional salwar kameez. Her translucent scarf, matching baggy pants and short-sleeved top are a beautiful sea-green trimmed with gold, but the vibrant colour is subdued in the dim lighting of this corner of the room.
The men all sit in a much larger, brighter space that runs off at a right angle to the women’s area. Most are wearing Western-style pants and shirts, but every head is covered with the traditional turban that is compulsory for Sikh men. The colours vary from the predominant black to electric blue and peacock green. All the men have beards, some of them flowing to their chests with distinguished streaks of grey. Traditionally, Sikh men do not trim their beards because cutting hair is forbidden, but not all the men in this congregation adhere strictly to the principle.
There are no chairs in a gurdwara. Everyone is sitting cross-legged on the floor, which is covered in a 1980s-style neutral beige carpet with a thick sculptured pile. Behind a low wooden balustrade at the front of the hall is a timber throne with an ornate carved canopy and a raised platform covered with a beautiful silk cloth of dazzling yellow. Underneath lies the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. More than 1400 pages long, it containing words spoken by the gurus who founded the religion in the form of shabad or hymns. The church contains no idols or statues, and there is no incense, just large vases of flowers standing on the floor in front of the throne.
Off to one side, three musicians and singers sit on a low platform. One of them has been playing the tabla since Daljit entered the building. As she settles, there is a quiet pause before another musician brings an Indian harmonium to life. The gentle droning ebbs and flows in soothing waves as the priest leading the service begins speaking in Punjabi. The other musicians join in as he moves into a hymn and the congregation starts singing along, following the words as they appear on a large projector screen. They are written in three forms—English, Punjabi written phonetically using the English alphabet, and Gurmukhi, the ancient script traditionally used to write Punjabi. Two young boys are sitting in front of the screen with a laptop, changing the slides as the hymn progresses. At one point they move on too quickly, and one boy nudges the other to go back, but there is a fair amount of repetition to the words and the singing doesn’t falter.
At the end of the service, volunteers move among the seated congregation handing out parshad. The sweet pudding made of flour, sugar and clarified butter has been sitting in a large silver saucepan on a table near the throne. Everyone accepts a small clump of the soft, warm mixture, holding up cupped hands to receive it, as a sign of humility and respect. The formalities over, people move next door to the dining hall for a shared meal
of vegetarian food. Saturday worship always ends this way as an important expression of equality and caring among the community. The food is free and freely given, with no attention paid to gender or social status or even religion.
Daljit finds a place among the women and children who gravitate to three long runners of blue-grey carpet stretching from one end of the space to the other. Light pouring in from large rectangular windows brings out the rich and varied colours of their scarves as they sit side by side, in single file. While they chat comfortably with each other, half a dozen or so young men move along the rows handing out stainless steel thali plates onto which they dollop out large spoonfuls of food. Today volunteers have prepared a simple but delicious mild okra curry, dhal, chapattis and a runny pudding made with sweetened condensed milk.
Daljit doesn’t go to the gurdwara every weekend. Friends of her husband introduced them to a Christian church in Loxton, and she goes there most Sundays. She feels absolutely no quandary in this unorthodox combination of worship. Monica says it was not necessarily the same for her as a child, adding to her confused sense of identity. ‘And it is a bit controversial in our community,’ she adds.
For KJ, the situation is different again. ‘I feel more Australian than I do Indian, and I feel more comfortable at the Christian church,’ she admits. ‘I know more people and I understand it better, and the pastor there has always been in our family’s life. If Mum has a problem and needs to talk to someone, she would often go to our pastor because he’s always there for us. If we ever needed anything, he would always help us out.’
In her own mind, Daljit has a very strong conviction that the religions have more in common than most people realise. Like Christians, Sikhs worship one god. Both religions stress the importance of doing good works—it is not enough just to go to church once a week and follow the rituals. Followers are encouraged to keep God in their hearts and minds at all times, live honestly and work hard, treat everyone equally, be generous to the less fortunate and serve others. ‘At the end of the day, all the gods say the same thing—love each other, help each other. I don’t know much, but that is what I am thinking. It doesn’t matter where you go, you need to trust what they are saying and bring it practically into your life,’ Daljit says.